Crucial Adrenaline 50GB m4 Cache SSD Review

PC Mark 7 & Real World Tests

PCMark 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

We are continuing to use the new PCMark 7 software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifcially designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: The scores for the Crucial Adrenaline m4 50GB in cache mode with the VelociRaptor put up very good scores here, second only to the pure HyperX SSD from Kingston.

5GB File Copy Tests

One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files. Using a free application called Teracopy, we copied large numbers of two file types from one folder to another on the same drive. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and using the same drive prevents other devices from tainting the outcome. The operation requires the drive to perform both sustained read and writes simultaneously. The first set of files is a 5GB collection of JPG’s of variable size and compression levels with a few movie (.MOV) files thrown in for good measure since most cameras now take video as well as stills. The second is a collection of MP3 files of various sizes which totals 5GB collectively. These file types were chosen due to their wide use and mixture of file sizes and compression levels.

Install Results: This was one test where multiple iterations of the test yielded better results although any gains ceased after the third run. The final times are very good – better than any other hybrid solution other than the RevoDrive Hybrid.

Windows Boot Times

Windows start up/shutdown time is always something people are interested in and we haven’t done it in a while because there was little variation with the majority of the SSDs. We recently began using an application called BootRacer to objectively measure the startup times of the drives. All of the instances of Windows were identical and freshly installed with only the video driver installed.

Test Results: The very first boot measure with the Crucial Adrenaline was 17 seconds to logon and 24 seconds to desktop (the same as the bare VelociRaptor drive) . After the third boot, it dropped considerably to 15 and 8 respectively.

We’ll wrap this with a look at the total drive capacity and our final thoughts.